Hello H,

I’ve read the whole way through this thread. Forgive me if I’m interrupting.

Just to put my following comments into context, I previously worked for years in the communications dept of a large UK university, lecturing in writing related subjects. Before I did this, I spent a year learning communications as they related to teaching others, and how to communicate correctly with others, how to read body language correctly and so on. I am retired now.

The first thing that strikes me is that you have an unhealthy obsession with your phone. That’s not so unusual these days, especially with younger people!

The second thing that I noticed is that you are rarely interacting with anyone in the ‘real world’. You seem to be living in a virtual reality. Like you mentioned somewhere else in this thread, others have said you can’t really love someone you haven’t ever met in the ‘real world’. Met in person. Interacted with, face-to-face. You can like them an awful lot, you can enjoy communicating with them. You can love the inter-reaction. But unless you have known them in a physical environment, you cannot really ‘know’ them.

So what you have with this and other on-line friends is simply that. An on-line friendship. Communication via email is the modern form of having a penfriend and writing physical letters and posting by the mail. Although we have Skype and other visual electronic aids to communication, although graphical images such as smileys were developed to aid the communication of feelings digitally, it is still nowhere near having a conversation with a person face to face. You see each other on a screen, you cannot reach out and touch that person, even though you might be able to see their facial expressions.

Communication face to face is rather different from virtual communication. A face-to-face conversation with someone involves body language, facial expressions, and a whole lot of other non-verbal clues as to how both people are reacting to the conversation. Also the tone in someone’s voice is also communicated. Their scent (pheromones) is picked up by receptors in your nose and brain. Based on all those clues, either the conversation continues or it doesn’t, depending on what the content of the conversation is. And how those other clues are feeding into the conversation.

Humans have been communicating with each other for centuries face-to-face. Even without realising it, we have evolved to read the non-verbal clues – body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, pheromones, and a whole host of other things… and that dictates the way the conversation runs. This is a basic survival instinct of the human species.

A virtual conversation, either via a social website, or email or whatever else in electronic form, carries none of these clues as to how someone else is thinking, feeling or enjoying the conversation. The conversation here is simply words. It is very easy to misunderstand what someone says when it it simply written down. There are no clues as detailed above as with physical face-to-face conversations, although you might be able to see an image of somebody smiling on a screen. You still don’t have the complete picture of someone.

You are tying yourself up in knots over something you may have written and that someone *may* have taken offence to… so you over-compensate by sending more emails as that is your chosen form of communication.

Although you won’t like me saying this, I think you need to get off that phone, and get out into the real world. Make friends in reality proper, not virtual reality. Start with spending less time in your bedroom and interacting more with your mother and brother. Cook a meal for them and yourself. Sit at the table with them and share the meal, converse, interact. Spend time with real, live friends in a real live environment. Walk in the park, say hello or smile at other people. Learn to interact with real humans. You work all week, so do you email the people you work with or do you speak to them? Or are you glued to your phone at work as well, whenever possible, making conversation and inter-reaction with those that surround you impossible at work as well?

I say the above not to criticise you, but out of concern for your well being.

Try turning off your phone for one whole day. Just one day, for now. For a whole 24 hours. Can you cope with that thought? Could you do that? Can you turn off your phone for half of a day? For an hour?

With best wishes,

Jay x

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by JayJay.